...makes a 500 gal paludarium, right?
First of all, please try to bare with my lack of photographic skills.
Here's how it looked like when I first filled it with water:
As you can see, I decided to give a sort of a hamburger mattenfilter a shot in brackish tank.
The basic circulation is done by a Koralia 4 installed into a chamber so that it only draws part of it's flow through der matte...:
A mattfilter looks like crap, so I made a fake stone wall- sort of a thing to cover it. While I was at it, I decided to give a "poor man's live rock" a shot.
What I did was I made a basic mold with leca-cement mixture:
Then I covered the leca-cement with grey grout and carved it (when fresh) to resemble stone. The result is seen in following photos, the parts under water are done like this.
Then, to seed the very porous "live rock" I sunk the bits to the Baltic ocean (it is brackish, about 1.006 where the stones were lying) for a month to cure and to gather a bit of bacteria and microfauna.
This is taken from the backside of a piece after the bath:
They are actually very porous, the pic taken with a flash hides the porousness somehow...
At some point I made the fake rockwall for the upper part of the tank and the fake tree trunk thingy to hold the mangroves and sorta connect the bits to each other or something:
A couple of weeks after dumping the live-rock-background to the tank, it was cycled and the habitat looked like this:
An exceptionally crappy FTS of the thing:
Above surface:
Below, mangrowe rooting with a flash...
Just a couple of inches more and the first root hits the sand
Notice the swamp ceriths. There is a gazillion of them. I put them there to mix the sand for me. Now I'm thinking I need a puffer to cut 'em back a bit...
A happy camper. Doing his share to fullfill the monsterishness of this site.
That's it for now. I've got plans to upgrade the filtering capacity of the tank with a wet/dry undertank DIY thingy.
I also originally designed the upper rock wall to be equipped with a fresh water dripper system to accommodate some planting.
I'm also planning to add to underwater planting. Not too much, but I would like to see something there, more than the couple of dying java ferns...
And...and...and...
Maybe I get around to putting more effort to the thing now that it is a semi-public project?
Thanks for looking.
First of all, please try to bare with my lack of photographic skills.
Here's how it looked like when I first filled it with water:
As you can see, I decided to give a sort of a hamburger mattenfilter a shot in brackish tank.
The basic circulation is done by a Koralia 4 installed into a chamber so that it only draws part of it's flow through der matte...:
A mattfilter looks like crap, so I made a fake stone wall- sort of a thing to cover it. While I was at it, I decided to give a "poor man's live rock" a shot.
What I did was I made a basic mold with leca-cement mixture:
Then I covered the leca-cement with grey grout and carved it (when fresh) to resemble stone. The result is seen in following photos, the parts under water are done like this.
Then, to seed the very porous "live rock" I sunk the bits to the Baltic ocean (it is brackish, about 1.006 where the stones were lying) for a month to cure and to gather a bit of bacteria and microfauna.
This is taken from the backside of a piece after the bath:
They are actually very porous, the pic taken with a flash hides the porousness somehow...
At some point I made the fake rockwall for the upper part of the tank and the fake tree trunk thingy to hold the mangroves and sorta connect the bits to each other or something:
A couple of weeks after dumping the live-rock-background to the tank, it was cycled and the habitat looked like this:
An exceptionally crappy FTS of the thing:
Above surface:
Below, mangrowe rooting with a flash...
Just a couple of inches more and the first root hits the sand
Notice the swamp ceriths. There is a gazillion of them. I put them there to mix the sand for me. Now I'm thinking I need a puffer to cut 'em back a bit...
A happy camper. Doing his share to fullfill the monsterishness of this site.
That's it for now. I've got plans to upgrade the filtering capacity of the tank with a wet/dry undertank DIY thingy.
I also originally designed the upper rock wall to be equipped with a fresh water dripper system to accommodate some planting.
I'm also planning to add to underwater planting. Not too much, but I would like to see something there, more than the couple of dying java ferns...
And...and...and...
Maybe I get around to putting more effort to the thing now that it is a semi-public project?
Thanks for looking.
